Posted on 07/16/2009 9:24:22 AM PDT by seanmerc
WASHINGTON -- I had an historical flashback recently when I read a Washington Post news story about how the U.S. commander in Afghanistan thinks he may need many thousands more troops to win the war.
Shades of Vietnam. Do we ever learn?
It brought back memories of the late Gen. William C. Westmoreland, the U.S. commander in Southeast Asia, who kept escalating the troop numbers after the 1967 Tet offensive in Vietnam. His strategy produced a debacle for us.
When the besieged Westmoreland requested 240,000 more troops, President Lyndon B. Johnson was shocked. The command in Vietnam had been giving him rosy reports about U.S. military progress that he wanted to believe.
Johnson had been preparing to run for reelection in 1968. However, after the devastating Westmoreland request, Johnson threw in the towel and made the electrifying announcement that he would not seek another term.
Fast forward to Afghanistan, 2009.
Now seven years into the war there, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the new U.S. commander in Afghanistan, is in the middle of a 60-day assessment of the war, due next month. But the Washington Post article says he has been giving Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates weekly updates about the need to bolster the size of the Afghan army and police force and the likely deployment of thousands more U.S. trainers and advisers.
The present Pentagon plan calls for about 68,000 U.S. troops to be in Afghanistan by late this year.
Afghanistan, which once harbored Osama bin Laden’s al Qaida training camps, has been on Obama’s agenda since his presidential campaign. Now it’s his war -- big time -- even as it takes on the appearance of another quagmire for U.S. forces in their effort to quell the Taliban and al Qaida fighters.
Gates is expected to go along with whatever McChrystal concludes is necessary. So is President Barack Obama, a neophyte who has taken on the mission defined by the Bush administration, apparently without hesitation.
Maybe the president should have asked the Russians on his recent journey to Moscow how it was that a superpower like the Soviet Union could have been forced to retreat from Afghanistan in the 1980s, despite its modern military might.
Granted the U.S. was supporting the Afghans with arms and training but the war proved to be too much for the Soviet forces.
The late Defense Secretary Robert McNamara in the Kennedy and Johnson eras delivered public mea culpas in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. His guilt was that he stayed with the U.S. military strategy in Vietnam, even though he was convinced that the Vietnam War was unwinnable.
Speaking of the war in his 1995 memoir, McNamara said: "We were wrong, terribly wrong."
I don’t expect the same kind of acknowledgement from the neoconservatives who got us into Iraq. That would be the day.
According to Bradley Graham, a biographer of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and an ex-Washington Post Pentagon reporter, Rumsfeld never wavered in his conviction that he did the right thing by invading Iraq. Graham said Rumsfeld had no regrets about his conduct of the war and dismissed his question about what was his biggest mistake.
Nor will former President George W. Bush or Vice President Dick Cheney or their hawkish team of architects show any remorse for their terrible mistake in attacking Iraq.
The buck now stops with Obama, who is making a big deal about how he doesn’t want to look back at past mistakes. He could end up repeating those mistakes.
LOL. Thomas really hates Obama since he tried to silence the DC press corp.
I consider it to be a public service. :-)
Helen's memory of Vietnam is as selective as that of any liberal's who insists he understood everything about the war but was never there. The war wasn't lost until the troops departed, dear. Remember?
More troops is also reminiscent of...let's see, what was that other country in the Middle East? Began with an "I" if I remember correctly. Helen doesn't, because we won that one. Which is why Vietnam came up instead of it.
Help! I’m blocked at work. Can someone please post an antidote?
As Tony Snow would say, ‘thanks for the Hezbollah point of view, Helen.’
Sadist!
Complete bullshit, 100% historical revisionism. Johnson's perfumed princes who never left DC/VA/MD/NY were busy playing Risk at the WH, ignored input from the ground, and held both good and bad news from Vietnam in low esteem. They did not react to reports from anyone with dirty boots, but they reacted strongly to reports from the media (almost all of it bad - especially bad was the coverage of near-successful operations, prompting their cancellation).
Johnson was not interested in winning or losing the war - he and his inner circle wanted to perpetuate it for as long as politically viable for the benefit of certain contractors, as well as to assist in his war on poverty by using part of the pesky undertrained "underclass" to absorb shrapnel. Political interference, political incompetence, media criminality, and political criminality rendered the war in Vietnam a total waste of American life and money. Johnson, McNamara, and the rest are roasting in hell.
Why is the old hag trying to protect the legacy of that butcher? Because of his Great Society expansion of the fascist New Deal? Reflexive action to protect a (D)?
Now THAT’S FUNNY!
Helen had better be quiet or 0b0z0 will send Jack Kevorkian, his choice of MD to run health care for those of us over the age of 60, to make a house call on Helen.
Seanmerc: What issue of GQ magazine were you featured in? To all you posters who are horrified by Helen Thomas’ picture-post yours for critique
Why do the Helen Thomas posts always seem to show up around lunchtime?
Sheesh! There oughtta be a law!
short/quick/honest answer:
Tell them; Its' a "Buglight"...STUPID! *ZAP / ZOT*
...better there, than here. 
>>President Barack Obama, a neophyte
Now she tells us.
It’s a deliberate, sinister plan! :-)
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